Black Rock White City (2015) by AS Patric. Transit Lounge Australia
And we have a winner. Black Rock White City, AS Patric’s dark, sorrowful story has impressed the judges sufficiently for them to award it first prize. I too was captured by the world of the novel, and by the central characters: Jovan, who “had been a poet in Yugoslavia when that was still a country”, and who is now a cleaner at a Melbourne hospital; and Suzana, his wife, who works as a cleaner in Melbourne’s Black Rock, and who comes from White City (“the literal translation of Belgrade”).
Suzana and Jovan are survivors of the Bosnian conflict, and have made their way to Melbourne where they are eking out a small spare life. Their story is told through a series of analepses and prolepses — fleeting glimpses of their life before Australia, more fully sketched accounts of their lives in the here and now. Both were academics before the war, living with their two small children a comfortable European life. This came to an end, when hate turned
into fire, free-floating and exploding throughout a city, and then materialising again into a blistered red monster more real than any creature children imagine in night-time terrors.
Though Suzana and Jovan escaped the fire and the hate by escaping Sarajevo, it has not let them go. They lost everything: their home, careers, and identity; their children, who died after eating poisoned meat; their dream of a future; even their sexual lives. Suzana has been unable to make love with Jovan since their children’s death, so he is having an impersonal affair with Tammie, a dentist: for her, he is “a tool for her sexual fantasies”; for him, she is mere physical release.
The story is animated by the graffiti artist who is haunting the hospital where Jovan works. Known to the hospital community as Dr Graffito, this shadowy person daubs obscene, obscure, and often darkly funny texts on the hospital walls and windows, the plates in its cafeteria, even cutting it into the flesh of cadavers. Jovan, whose job it is to clean up the mess, finds in the messages strange resonances with his own history: a strange connection with this bête noire.
Suicides and other deaths follow the pattern of Dr Graffito’s project, and this is a mystery that remains unresolved, a topic of conversation among the workers, a sharp point of anxiety. This mystery weaves through the gradually shifting lives of Jovan and Suzana as they begin to move out of mere survival into a kind of living, a kind of loving.
I couldn’t help but read this novel, in some ways, as an analogy for the contemporary tragedy that is the forced, mass movement of people across the globe. Australian government policy performs a double act: erecting powerful barriers to anyone seeking asylum, and locking away, out of sight and out of story, those who have managed to reach Australian territory.
This novel is a reminder that every refugee, every asylum seeker, is a person, an individual, someone struggling to return to the world of light after the disaster. And it is a reminder too that it can happen to anyone. “When you think refugee, you think black, brown or Asian,” says Bill, Jovan’s co-worker, but Europeans, academics, poets, lawyers: anyone can fall into that pit, and become a Jovan or a Suzana, a human being desperately trying to accommodate the trauma that has upended their lives, that has clamped itself to them.
Yes, this is grim stuff. It is harrowing, densely tragic, almost devoid of hope. Almost, but not entirely. Jovan and Suzana, after all, have retained dignity, if nothing else; she is beginning to creep back toward life by learning to become a novelist; he is beginning to recover memories of the poetry he wrote in his former life as a result of the absurd, obscure, obscene writing with which Dr Graffito desecrates the walls and windows and cadavers of the hospital.
It’s not all darkness: there are moments of great tenderness scattered throughout the narrative and, like any good chiaroscuro, there is always a bit of light in the shadow.
Iceland has been in the news quite a lot lately, mainly because of its young soccer team’s outstanding performance in the Euro 2016 football tournament. And there has also been a surge of general interest in other aspects of Icelandic culture, including modern Icelandic literature.
Halldór Laxness By Nobel Foundation [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Icelanders love books, both reading and writing them, and in recent years translations of contemporary Icelandic literature have made it into bookshops and literary pages abroad in increasing numbers. Nor must we forget that in 1955 the Icelander Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Back in the Middle Ages, Icelanders were great literary producers and consumers too. The term “saga” is used to refer to the new literary genre that developed in Iceland from the late 12th century up to the end of the 15th century and sometimes later than that.
“Saga” is an Icelandic word that means “something said, a narrative”. Originally the term is likely to have been applied to stories that were probably formed and transmitted orally. Later, they came to be recorded in writing, in hand-written manuscripts, many of which survive to the present day, though a good number have perished over the past 500 years or so.
In terms of its structure, the Icelandic saga is usually a prose narrative, but in many cases contains a good deal of embedded poetry. With regard to its subject-matter, the saga falls into several categories, and these allow it to be differentiated into generic sub-groups.
The subjects of sagas
Sagas of kings are historical biographies of the kings of Norway (and to a lesser extent, of Denmark) from prehistoric times into the 14th century. Although the antecedents of the first kings’ sagas were composed by Norwegians, Icelanders quickly became the masters of this genre, which usually contains much embedded poetry. This poetry is attributed to the court poets, or skalds, of these kings, whose compositions (mostly elaborate praise-poems) must have been passed down by word of mouth, in some cases over more than 200 years.
Most Icelandic saga writing was probably considered in the Middle Ages to be a form of history rather than fiction. This does not necessarily mean that the standards of modern historiography were applied to it, but what is narrated is likely to have been considered to be within the bounds of historical probability.
Coleridge’s “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, that constitutes poetic faith” might have applied in the consciousness of some audiences to some of the events and characters that appear in a sub-group of the saga that modern scholars call the fornaldarsögur (“sagas of the old time”), in which supernatural happenings abound. But other people would probably have considered such things to have been normal in the society of the pre-Christian age in Scandinavia and other prehistoric realms.
As for the Icelanders’ own history, that was the subject of several sub-genres of the saga, including the best-known today, the so-called “sagas of Icelanders” or “family sagas”, as they are often known in English.
There were also the so-called “contemporary sagas” that tell of what happened in Icelandic society during the turbulent 13th century – in the middle of which Iceland lost its political independence to Norway – and sagas of bishops and saints.
Furthermore, following the Norwegian king Hákon Hákonarson’s introduction of a programme of translating French romances into Norwegian, another type of saga, the sagas of knights, appeared, at first translating foreign romances, later, in Icelandic hands, developing indigenous romance narratives.
From the 18th century, when saga translations first began to appear in modern European languages, sagas of Icelanders (family sagas) in particular have attracted foreign readers. There are now many English translations to choose from, in some cases multiple versions of a single saga.
The most widely accessible at present are probably the most recent Penguin translations, which are new editions of a five-volume series originally published in Iceland in 1997 as The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. These were prepared by a number of saga scholars in collaboration with Icelandic colleagues. Increasingly, there are saga translations available on the web, though their quality is not always reliable.
Sagas of Icelanders are about Icelandic families whose ancestors migrated to Iceland from Norway, the British Isles and (in a few cases) other parts of Scandinavia towards the last decades of the ninth and the first three decades of the 10th century AD.
Some people have called Viking-Age and medieval Iceland the first post-colonial European society and there are certainly parallels to be drawn with ideas from contemporary post-colonial studies.
Ingólfur Arnarson is considered the first permanent Nordic settler of Iceland. By Johan Peter Raadsig (1806 – 1882) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Empire writing back to the motherland
Icelandic saga writing can be seen in the context of the modern idea (first formulated by Australian scholars) of the empire writing back to the motherland, in this case Iceland “writing back” to Norway and to common Scandinavian oral traditions of poetry and story. In this process, medieval Icelandic authors created a new literary form.
The structure of saga narratives allows a number of different thematic and stylistic tropes to flourish. Many sagas of Icelanders are about feuds between families and their supporters; they give graphic accounts of fights, escapes, outlawry and reconciliation. They detail complex legal procedures that, in the absence of a police force on the island, were the individual’s main recourse to justice, but only if he had sufficiently powerful supporters.
Some sagas, the so-called sagas of poets, detail the love lives and stormy careers of well-known skalds, off duty in Iceland from their careers at the Norwegian court. Others are more regional histories of families from certain parts of Iceland and their struggles with neighbours and with the supernatural inhabitants of their region.
The saga form has often been compared to the modern literary form of the novel, but, though similarities exist, there are also important differences. Like the novel, the saga narrates a chronologically defined story, but as often as not, there is not one story, but several intertwined narratives in a saga.
That may sometimes be true of the novel, of course, but saga strands do not always link up to the main narrative. They may just peter out when the saga writer no longer needs a particular character or line of narration. It is common for saga authors to explain that someone or other is now “out of this saga”.
Unlike the novel, the saga does not normally get inside a character’s skin to reveal his or her inner thoughts or psychological motives; rather, external actions ascribed to the character reveal something of his motivation, given the small-scale society described and its conventionalised behaviour. For example, if a character puts on dark-coloured clothes (rather than neutral homespun), then you can be pretty sure something important is going to happen, usually of an aggressive nature.
Narrative voice
The stance of the saga’s narrating voice also differs from that of many narrative voices in the modern novel. The persona of the narrator is not omniscient, although he may reveal what the common opinion of a character or an action may be. Sometimes he will refer to dreams or what we would classify as supernatural happenings as indicators of what is likely to occur in the future or how a present action should be judged.
Njáll, the great Icelandic tribune jurist and counsellor, from The saga of Burnt Njáll. By Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons
An example from Brennu-Njáls saga, The saga of Burnt Njáll, regarded by many critics as the best of the Icelandic family sagas, shows how the narrative voice in a saga can be heard obliquely.
At a certain point in this saga, a group of men involved in a feud decide to burn Njáll and his family in their farmhouse, an act that was conventionally regarded as a heinous crime. Njáll himself, old and prescient, with an understanding of true Christian values though he lived before the conversion to Christianity, lies down with his wife under an ox hide to wait for death, saying that God “will not let us burn both in this world and the next”.
When, after the fire, the couple’s bodies are discovered to be uncorrupted, the audience is left to draw the conclusion (assuming a medieval understanding of the Christian religion) that God has indeed saved Njáll and his wife even though they were unbaptised. The conclusion here is, however, based upon our knowledge of how medieval Christian audiences, for whom these narratives were written, would think.
It is not directly stated, and quite recently an American scholar, William Ian Miller, has repudiated the interpretation above for one of pragmatic realism: the couple did not burn because the ox hide protected them.
I think myself that Miller is wrong, and that the text contains ample clues of how the audience for which the saga was written would have understood it and how we should understand it today.
Although medieval Icelandic sagas are much less well known than many other classics of European literature, they richly deserve a place in the company of the best that European literature has to offer.
We do not know the names of their authors, and must recognise that the anonymity of those who created them has a literary point to make: sagas narrate history, and that history belongs, if not to everyone living in Iceland at the time of writing (and to their modern descendants), then to specific families and other interest groups, whose ancestors figure in their stories. The authors shaped those stories but did not distort them.
The literary calendar is marked by big public events: writers festivals, book fairs, and the announcements first of shortlists and then of winners of major literary awards. For Australian writers and readers, the Miles Franklin is a lodestone, our Big Award – the one that celebrates not just writing, not just fiction, but particularly and peculiarly Australian writing.
Since 2013 that award has been accompanied by the second literary award to be named for Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin: the Stella Prize, established to recognise women’s contribution to Australian literature.
This year, it seems to me, the Miles Franklin shortlist entirely honours the founder of the award, not only because four of the five novelists are women, but also because each of the novels, in their own idiosyncratic and nuanced ways, reflects and represents Australian life, presenting as that “indigenous literature” (Franklin’s term) that prevents people from being “alien in their own soil”.
The novels do not, though, offer a comfortable or consoling rendition of Australian life: if anything, they turn their lenses on alienation, and on the weight of the ordinary occasions of everyday life, as well as the larger scale complexities of, say, the socio-political landscape, that bear down on individuals.
This makes them sound a bit “worthy” and “serious”: novels that take as their task the imperative to instruct readers about The Human Condition. But in fact each is remarkably readable; each writer has a wonderful sense of story and its elements: character, pacing, setting and yes, even plot. Any would be a worthy recipient of this prestigious award, to be announced Friday night.
Let me tiptoe through them in alphabetical order.
Hope Farm by Peggy Frew
Hope Farm (2015) by Peggy Frew. Scribe
Peggy Frew’s Hope Farm is set in 1985 Gippsland. It is narrated by Silver, daughter of Ishtar who – pregnant as a teenager – fled the petit bourgeois morality of 1970s Queensland that would have forcibly removed her baby from her, for the uncertain support of a local ashram. The story unfolds on the ironically misnamed Hope Farm, a communal property occupied mainly by feckless incompetents. Ishtar and Silver may be misfits, but they are neither feckless nor incompetent; and their arrival, along with that of Ishtar’s new man Miller, initiates an unravelling of that decaying place, that compromised community.
There are the expected conflicts – children vs adults; bullies vs bullied; male vs female; parent vs child – but they are delivered with a clarity and tenderness that takes readers beyond the surface impression of, say, snotty child, or slovenly adult, to the fullness, the complexity, of any individual, or group of individuals. I wouldn’t dream of saying “redemption” in relation to this novel – and indeed this is not a redemptive story in the classical sense – but it does offer a stage on which Silver, and her equally misplaced friend Ian, and her shining, glorious, damaged mother Ishtar, can begin to feel their way beyond mere survival, and toward a more endurable life
Leap by Myfanwy Jones
Leap (2015) by Myfanwy Jones. Allen & Unwin
With Leap Myfanwy Jones has crafted a lyrical account of mourning, and the long, lonely, difficult work of building sufficient scar tissue over the wounds of bereavement to allow mourners the possibility of moving on. Much of this work is couched in terms of physical being: the parkour through which Joe, muted by the death of his girlfriend Jen, is feeling his way back into the world; or the stillness and compulsive observation, that Jen’s mother, Elsie uses as her connection to memories of her daughter, to the idea of being alive.
Cats are important metaphors in this novel: the cat leap that Joe is learning to perform; the tigers that have captured Elsie’s imagination; the “catlike containment” of the mysterious nurse who moves into the spare room in Joe’s share house; Jen’s intention to have tiger stripes tattooed on her leg. Cats as a way of thinking about being: it worked for me. The novel is moving; the language poetic; the morphology of grief very believable.
Black Rock White City by AS Patric
Black Rock White City (2015) by AS Patric. Transit Lounge Australia
With Black Rock White City we are again in the company of grief: loss, bereavement, trauma. Of the central characters, AS Patric’s narrator says, “Neither of them is sure about the present but this is some sort of afterlife”. Jovan and Suzana, refugees from the war in Sarajevo, have left their lives behind, along with the bodies of their little children: “Their names were Dejan and Ana. And there’s nothing more that can be said about the dead that doesn’t make them small, lost and forgotten”.
They are living now in the sort of afterlife you find in mythology: grey, and sad, and haunted by the shades of all they have lost. Even Jovan’s name has been lost in this new country (“Jo … Ja … Joh-von. Ja-Va. Ah fuck it, we’ll call you Joe”). But of course we never entirely lose, or escape, our past. The idea of war has come with them; Dr Graffito, who defaces the walls of the hospital with violent phrases, is a metaphor as well as an actuality of violence and death. But Patric does not leave Suzana and Jovan there; slowly, tenderly, they begin to emerge into this new country and all its possibilities.
Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar
Salt Creek (2015) by Lucy Treloar. Pan Macmillan Australia
Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek treads the sort of ground broken a few years ago by Kate Grenville and her Secret River. Set in the Coorong in South Australia, peopled by the Finches – a large and ever-expanding family whose father cannot find the balance between ideal and action – it’s narrated by Hester, the eldest daughter and the one who is required to provide the through line for the family: including cooking and cleaning and supporting her depressed mother and caring for the little children.
What I found compelling was not the story of Hester’s endurance, but rather the way Treloar depicts the relationship between the local people and the Finches: the stupidity and carelessness, the casual brutality, with which the settlers treat the Indigenous owners of land to which they have laid claim; and the way some of the Finch children begin to connect, however inadequately, with some of the local people. One of the rare sunny spots in the novel is provided by Tully, a local youth, who is adored both by Addie, Hester’s lighthearted sister, and Fred, her artist brother. And yes, it ends in tears. Indeed, this particular colonial adventure generally ends in betrayal, brokenness and disappointment; but to say this so bluntly is to ignore the beauty of the language, the lightness with which the historical context is carried by the story, and the vivid presence of the physical environment, which is as fully realised as are the central characters.
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
The Natural Way of Things (2015) by Charlotte Wood. Allen & Unwin
Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, in equal parts captivated and appalled me. Built out of the actuality of the Hay Institution for Girls, an institution established for the punitive constraint of adolescent “offenders”, this novel operates as a dystopic fable of the control of women and women’s sexuality. The ten young women who suffer “the natural way of things” have all been the subjects of very public sexual scandals. They have been kidnapped and enslaved and brutalised by the agents of a vaguely identified corporation, Harding International.
Their heads shaved, their clothes exchanged for heavy boots and rough dresses, and their eyes and arms under constraints, the women find themselves “abducted right into the middle of the nineteen fucking fifties”. The necessarily “bald and frightened girls” and their dull abusive captors gradually adapt to this bizarre life, in a Waiting for Godot situation where day after day Harding International fails to arrive. But how does anyone adapt to the impossible: to authorised misogyny, to absent rights? They don’t, of course; they simply find ways to accommodate themselves to it.
In those accommodations we see the crippling of selves; the ambiguous comfort of friendship; the giving over of personal values for tiny physical ease. While there are fleeting gestures toward a sense of sisterhood, only two characters really come out of it with any honour: Yolanda, betrayed by her beloved brother, named “lunatic”, but able to hunt and kill, and thus to keep everyone alive, for a time; and Verla, who is able to use her brain, and thus to some extent keep them comparatively functional. It is gruelling to read, shattering. It is important.
Novels build in their readers a capacity for empathy, we are told. These five novels do precisely that, and besides are lovely to read – each writer has a feeling for sentences and phrases, and has built in such narrative traction that I read them at a gulp, emerging only at the end, blinking, before returning to the everyday. These novels are scored through by sensitivity, clarity, and a ruthless generosity of voice, and feel their way into character, into ethical complexities, and into the small and large ways our society creaks on.
This National Bookshop Day, Australia’s one-time Minister for Small Business, Nick Sherry, will be remembered for his words, not his deeds. A reader, bookbuyer and enthusiastic patron of terrestrial bookshops, in June 2011 Sherry told a conference on online business that,
In five years, other than a few speciality bookshops in capital cities, you will not see a bookstore. They will cease to exist.
Booksellers were livid, and I don’t just mean standing behind their counters muttering impolite thoughts about the minister down into their cardigans. They got pretty shouty. And determined to prove him wrong.
Nick Sherry in 2011. Alan Porritt/AAP
Australia’s inaugural National Bookshop Day was held two months later. The sixth, on August 13, will be the first to fall beyond the minister’s five-year time period. And bricks-and-mortar booksellers have outlasted VCR manufacturers, Kodachrome and Nokia’s dominance of the phone industry to still be alive and kicking.
As it turned out, the minister was wrong – he extrapolated too far – but there were reasons at the time to have reservations about the industry’s prospects. The REDGroup – parent company of Borders and Angus & Robertson – had just gone into receivership and there were concerns that much of its 20% share of the Australian book trade might simply be lost, with those dollars drifting away from books, or at least from Australian retailers.
Amazon had been on the rise since the 90s, and almost no one could price like it. It paid no high-street rents, it paid no counter staff, it had scale and much of the time it wasn’t even focused on profit, cutting prices even leaner to build its customer database and achieve market dominance.
When Sherry spoke, the GFC was still a recent memory, and books had started to look like discretionary purchases. Around the same time, the promise of e-reading was finally realised with the arrival of devices that people were actually happy to use, such as the Kindle and the iPad. US ebook sales had risen 1,260% between 2008 and 2010. The line on that graph goes to a crazy place pretty quickly, if you let it.
Factor in the time-sucking vortex of the internet – Facebook, YouTube, news, gossip, downloadable games, streaming video services, op-ed pieces like, um, this one – and its potential impact on book reading, and the environment looks extra tough. Charles Darwin, survival-of-the-fittest tough.
So in 2011, it was possible, if you stared wide-eyed and fearfully at nothing but recent statistics and an upended entertainment landscape, to envisage a contracted book industry comprising only ebooks and a single enormous warehouse that had paper books zipping along conveyor belts and packaged and mailed by robots in response to a customer’s click on the other side of the world.
In the short term, Sherry seemed dangerously close to the mark. In the year he made his prediction, Australian book sales ended up crashing 18% by value. That is, a billion-dollar industry saw sales slump by almost a fifth in a single year. The following year, the industry relied on Fifty Shades of Grey to mask another disastrous fall. Remove that trilogy from the stats and sales dropped a further 12.5% in 2012.
But it’s now 2016 and the scheduled apocalypse didn’t arrive. So, what happened?
Ebooks are here to stay, but paper books aren’t going away and, despite Amazon, neither is the astute neighbourhood bookseller – who realises that ebooks are not an enemy vanquished and that the landscape is not what it once was, but that the local bookshop has a place in it anyway. Recently, bookshop numbers have been rising rather than falling. According to Joel Becker, CEO of the Australian Booksellers Association, “we’ve seen an increase over the past couple of years of about 5%.”
South Brisbane’s Title bookstore. Rae Allen/flickr
The ebook market will continue to evolve, and what ebooks are will continue to evolve too, but, in the absence of major drivers of new growth, sales are unlikely to grow at the rate they managed at the time of the Sherry prediction. The audiobook market will probably continue to expand.
While all panicked eyes were on ebooks, audio sales – now mostly digital downloads – were happily off to one side growing at double-digit speed year after year.
Meanwhile, back in the world of paper books, Amazon will not go away.
In fact, Amazon is opening bookshops of its own. Because maybe even it knows that “people who bought this also bought that” isn’t the same as browsing the shelves of a neighbourhood bookshop. It rates as an experience, and flicking through stamp-sized book cover images online really doesn’t.
Browsing in a bookshop feels like time well spent, while searching for a book online feel like squandered time – only the purchase counts.
A local bookshop is part of a community, working with schools and families and all nearby readers to link them with books they might come to love, connecting with its customers and bringing a human kind of expertise whenever it’s asked for. It is a hub for bookclubs and author events and the chance encounters that lead to the discovery of an unfamiliar writer who becomes a lifelong favourite. It remains far better than an algorithm when suggesting what book your eight-year-old niece or granddaughter might like for her birthday.
And, happy as I am to read ebooks or listen to audiobooks, the local bookshop’s product, paper books, rates as entertainment. The paper book is a value proposition. Twenty or thirty dollars buys you hours of deep, screen-free, distraction-free reading. Nothing pings, nothing beeps and your paper book doesn’t let you know about some random person’s Facebook update or a newly arrived spam email. In a world of multi-tasking and deliriously excessive inputs, reading a paper book is mono-tasking at its finest.
Paper books and the people in our neighbourhoods who sell them to us have not faded into the past and will not be going away any time soon. I’m sure Nick Sherry would be happy to be wrong about that, and will be as glad as any of us that we still have bookshops to celebrate at National Bookshop Day in 2016.
Arts and culture are part of the broad subset of economic activities that are afforded special treatment – usually within the ambit of a government ministry – by some claim to special circumstances or importance. Defence, transport infrastructure, sports and education are other examples. What these sectors have in common is the claim that they produce public goods, or experience substantial market failure, justifying public support.
In this view, the problem with the arts and cultural economy is on the supply side. If left to the market, too few resources will be devoted to arts and cultural production. Hence government support is necessary to arrive at a socially optimal level of arts and cultural production.
But a different way of understanding the problems in the economics of arts and culture is from the perspective of the consumer (not the producer). Here the problem is simply that choice is hard because quality is uncertain. Markets can fail when producers lack the incentives to produce enough exciting new work, but markets can also fail because consumers don’t know how to choose over the set of new things, and find it easier to choose nothing. That is, they stay away.
By definition, art produces something novel and unique. This is something that economists call an experience good. You only know what you think of it after you’ve consumed it. This means that demand and purchase occurs before you know whether you will like something. Markets fail here because they don’t carry enough information.
Market-making in these industries invariably involves creating mechanisms to deal with the quality uncertainty problem. Often the economic success of a sub-sector depends upon the extent to which it can solve this problem.
There are several such mechanisms. One is a minimum quality standard, of the sort imposed through industrial regulations, licenses or certifications. These are used extensively in restaurant and tourism to signal minimum cleanliness, safety or service. Another is the use of a brand, which functions as a reputational hostage. Publishing Imprints and Galleries use this mechanism. Another mechanism is social network markets, where the pooling of the choices of other consumers fill in the information gaps. Box office sales and consumer reviews are examples of such.
But another important mechanism is awards. Awards are characterised by disinterested expert assessment of quality. Indeed, industries with substantial quality uncertainty problems (e.g. wine, movies, architecture, advertising, science, complex engineering) also tend to have high profile, high prestige awards (e.g. the Academy Awards for film, the Emmy’s for television).
So awards matter. But how do they actually work? And do they work differently in different industries?
A new study by Erwin Dekker and Marielle De Jong, both cultural economists from Erasmus University in the Netherlands, has examined a long and deep new data set on book awards in three countries: the US, France and the Netherlands. Their new paper called What Do Book Awards Signal? alights on a surprising finding, namely that book awards don’t work the same way that, as a prime comparison, movie awards work.
Why don’t book awards work in the same way as movie awards? AAP Image/Daniel Munoz
The basic difference is that with movie awards there is a relatively strong correlation between the assessments of different award juries (say Cannes, Sundance and the Oscars), and between these awards and popular consumer perceptions of quality, as measured with audience ratings. Relatively strong here means on the order of 50% correlation, which still leaves a lot of room for disagreement.
But with books, the overlap between different expert assessments of quality, i.e. consensus of expert opinion, is much lower: Dekker and De Jong find that it is 10% in the US, 7% in the Netherlands and just 3% in France.
So it seems that award winning books do not represent expert consensus about quality. So what are book awards doing? Dekker and De Jong suggest, following the work of Lucien Karpik, that book awards are signalling not a shared consensus on quality, but a judgement of distinctiveness.
Indeed, such awards work to precisely signal that a particular award winning book will not correspond to a common opinion assessment of quality.
An award winning book carries the signal that the reader will be consuming more than just a good book, but something more precious in a social context, namely a book of distinction, a quality that then carries over to the reader.
Why do book awards work this way? One reason is that books require more investment (i.e. time) than do movies. A second reason is that many more people need to agree that a movie is good through the production process in order for it to be made at all, so higher expert consensus is more likely.
Suppose now you’re a public benefactor of the arts and culture, or specifically that you were Mitch Fifield, Australia’s Arts Minister. One thing you can do is direct subsidy. That’s the producer-side market failure model. But while that makes the recipients happy, it doesn’t actually solve the quality uncertainty problem. The risk with that strategy is that all you’ll do is make some producers happy and leave the consumers of arts and culture no better off at all.
To solve that problem, consider setting up an award. Or rather, another new type of award. Can there be too many awards? Probably. But we are nowhere near that margin yet, and certainly not with high distinctiveness arts such as books, theatre, and dance. And the fun thing is you even get the legacy effect when you name the award after yourself.
For a prime example of Australia’s innovation economy in action, look no further than the humble picture book. Staple of bedtime reading, offering textual delights beyond the verbal, picture books are a hidden treasure.
Australian picture books sell around the world, and are translated into many languages — take for instance, Jackie French’s iconic Diary of a Wombat (2002), which appears in French, German, Korean, and many more. But though the words need translating, the images, (in French’s book by Bruce Whatley), communicate across language barriers.
The interplay between words and images is one of the magic ingredients in a show-stopping picture book. Achieving that magic requires serious innovation. Writers, illustrators and editors work hard to balance word with image, and to carry the story or message through both.
It takes time, dedication, and care to make a picture book, and though some may be flipped through in minutes, others repay repeated reading and looking. Next time you pick one up in a bookshop or library, look at its design, the way the pictures engage with character, or setting, or contribute to mood, theme, and the controlling idea.
Dirty Dinsoaur by Janeen Brian Viking
Ann James’s illustration of I’m a Dirty Dinosaur (2013) (text Janeen Brian) is a recent example. James’s lively dinosaur invites children in to the story, acting out the rhymes:
I’m a dirty dinosaur
with a dirty snout.
I never wipe it clean
I just sniff and snuff about.
Simple but evocative line drawings of this muddy dinosaur (made using Victorian mud!) connect beautifully with the energy of the rhymes, and provide young readers with visually engaging and memorable ideas.
Kevin Burgemeestre’s wonderful handmade dioramas on the cover of the recent Hush Treasure Book (2015) show that illustrations don’t have to be drawn to be lively and vivid. Indeed, in another of his books, B is for Bravo (2003), they provide a realistic but imaginative romp through an excitingly three-dimensional alphabet of Australian Aviation.
Illustrators conduct specific research to find just the right images for particular stories. Anne Spudvilas’s illustrations for the picture book version of Li Cunxin’s Mao’s Last Dancer (2003) use traditional watercolour, and collage from old newspapers, to convey the wealth and variety of Chinese culture.
Experimentation, consultation, imagination, teamwork and individual interpretation are the name of the game. And they demonstrate the incredible care writers and illustrators take to make books that speak to the text, and to the reader. You can see Ann James talk here about how she conveys emotion in collaboration with the author:
Jeannie Baker, meanwhile, takes collage to its highest level in her carefully crafted books. Her Window (1991), and Where the Forest Meets the Sea (1987) use layered and detailed images and to convey a powerful environmental message.
Sometimes words are unnecessary. Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2007) tells a moving story about immigration through sepia pictures arranged as if in an old photo album. Any words would break the spell cast by these pictures, which call for a slow and thoughtful reading. Indeed, the only words that appear in the book are in a made-up font. Their unrecognisability symbolises the challenges facing new immigrants who have yet to learn the local language.
Gregory Rogers’s comic wordless story The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard (2004) is a wonderful contrast. Full of pace, fun, and historical detail, in company with the boy, bear and baron of the title, it takes us through the streets and theatres of Elizabethan London, pursued by the bard.
The Arrival by Shaun Tan Hodder & Stoughton
And Nick Bland challenges the form of the picture book altogether, with The Wrong Book (2009), in which monsters, pirates, royalty and animals intrude on the protagonist’s attempts to tell a story. (It’s available as a lovely app)
I’ve only touched on a few of the many wonderful Australian creators of picture books for young (and not so young) readers. Next time you read one (to yourself or to others), you could think about the innovation economy that is the illustration industry. But hopefully, and more likely, you could settle back and enjoy the story – words, images, and all.
This week is Children’s Book Week. And the Children’s Book Council of Australia will announce a swag of prizes in various award categories, including picture books.
The University of New England has hosted many illustrators over the years through a Copyright Agency Cultural Fund supported residency program. The work they did is on display at the University Library.
A new edition of the Australian National Dictionary has just been published. It contains 16,000 words and while the first edition (published in 1988) included about 250 words from 60 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, the latest has more than 500 words from 100 languages.
Conventional wisdom has it that borrowings of this kind usually occur in the initial “contact” period. In 1770, for instance, James Cook and Joseph Banks collected the word kangaroo from the Guugu Yimithirr language in the area now known as Cooktown in Queensland, and it immediately came into use in English.
Soon after the initial batches of convicts arrived in Sydney from 1788 onwards, words from local languages were taken up, especially for new flora and flora and for things associated with the Indigenous people: koala, wallaby, kurrajong, waratah, woomera, corroboree. Later, the language of the Perth area provided jarrah, kylie (a word for “boomerang”), numbat, and quokka. The language of the Geelong area provided the mythical monster the bunyip.
The Indigenous word waratah was quickly adopted. Internet archive book image/flickr
Some Aboriginal words, although noted in the early period, were not used widely in Australian English until much later. Perhaps the most startling example of this is the word quoll, which comes from the Guugu Yimithirr language, and was also collected by Cook and Banks in 1770.
When the Europeans arrived in 1788, they did not use quoll or other Indigenous names for these marsupials. Instead, they used the term native cat, preferring to construct terms based on superficial resemblances to things of their “known” world. It wasn’t until the 1960s that quoll was reintroduced, and eventually replaced native cat, largely due to the efforts of the naturalist David Fleay, who highlighted the absurdity of some of the vernacular names for Australian animals.
It took nearly 200 years for the word quoll to be widely used. WA Department of Parks and Wildlife/AAP
Many of the new Aboriginal words in this edition refer to flora and fauna, and many of these result from an interest in using Indigenous names rather than imposed English descriptive ones.
Thus, the southern and northern forms of the marsupial mole are now referred to by their Western Desert language names itjaritjari and kakarratul. The rodent once called the heath mouse is now known by its indigenous name dayang, from the Woiwurrung language of the Melbourne area. The amphibious rodent formerly known as water rat, is now more commonly referred to in southern Australia as the rakali, from the Ngarrindjeri language.
Other additions to the dictionary include (from the Noongar language of the Perth area) balga for the grass tree, coojong for the golden wreath wattle, moitch for the flooded gum and moort for Eucalyptus platypus.
Coojong, formerly known as golden wreath wattle. liesvanrompaey/flickr, CC BY
The increasing interest in bush tucker has meant the inclusion of akudjura for the bush tomato, from the Alyawarr language of the southern region of the Northern Territory, and gubinge, from Nyul Nyul and Yawuru of northern Western Australia, for an edible plum-like fruit.
Other new terms reflect a renewed interest in aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and various kinds of activism on the part of Indigenous peoples.
They include bunji, “a mate, a close friend a kinsman” (from Warlpiri and other languages of the Northern Territory and northern Queensland), boorie, “a boy, a child” (from Wiradjuri), jarjum, “a child” (from Bundjalung), kumanjayi, “a substitute name for a dead person” (from Western Desert language), pukamani “a funeral rite” (from Tiwi), rarrk “a cross-hatching design in art” (from Yolngu languages), tjukurpa, “the Dreaming; traditional law” (from Western Desert language) and yidaki, “a didgeridoo” (from Yolngu languages).
Performance of a Yidaki Didg and Dance at Sydney Opera House in 2000. Adam Pretty/AAP
The word migaloo – “a white person” – comes from Biri and other northern Queensland languages, where it originally meant “a ghost, a spirit”; many Australians are familiar with this word as a name for the albino humpback whale that migrates along the east coast of Australia.
Author provided
Many of these terms begin their transition to mainstream Australian English in forms of Aboriginal English, and some of them are primarily used in Aboriginal English.
In addition to the words from Indigenous languages, there are numerous terms new to the dictionary that render Indigenous concepts and aspects of traditional culture, formed from the resources of English.
These include such terms as: carved tree, dreamtime being, freshwater people, keeping place, law woman, paint up, saltwater people, secret women’s business, smoking ceremony, songline, sorry business, welcome to country.
A smoking ceremony at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra earlier this year. Mick Tsikas/AAP
Others derive from more specific political contexts and political activism: Day of Mourning, great Australian silence, Invasion Day, Mabo, tent embassy, traditional ownership and white blindfold (“a view of Australian history that emphasises the achievements of white society and ignores Aboriginal society”).
This is a dictionary based on historical principles. This means that each entry maps the full history of a word, establishing its origin, and documenting its use over time with illustrative quotations from books, newspapers, and the like. Words and meanings are included if they are exclusively Australian, or used in Australia in special or significant ways.
The dictionary, edited at the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University, and published by Oxford University Press, will be launched today at Parliament House in Canberra.
At the BookShelf 